‘I dinna ken what waur your honour could have wished him to do, unless he had broken his neck; and this is muckle the same to my hinnie Willie and me. Chaw, indeed! It is easy to say chaw, but wha is to gie us ony thing to chaw?—the bread-winner’s gane, and we may e’en sit down and starve.’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I will pay you for twenty such fiddles.’
‘Twenty such! is that a’ ye ken about it? the country hadna the like o’t. But if your honour were to pay us, as nae doubt wad be to your credit here and hereafter, where are ye to get the siller?’
‘I have enough of money,’ said I, attempting to reach my hand towards my side-pocket; ‘unloose these bandages, and I will pay you on the spot.’
This hint appeared to move her, and she was approaching the bedside, as I hoped, to liberate me from my bonds, when a nearer and more desperate shout was heard, as if the rioters were close by the hut.
‘I daurna I daurna,’ said the poor woman, ‘they would murder me and my hinnie Willie baith, and they have misguided us aneugh already;—but if there is anything worldly I could do for your honour, leave out loosing ye?’
What she said recalled me to my bodily suffering. Agitation, and the effects of the usage I had received, had produced a burning thirst. I asked for a drink of water.
‘Heaven Almighty forbid that Epps Ainslie should gie ony sick gentleman cauld well-water, and him in a fever. Na, na, hinnie, let me alane, I’ll do better for ye than the like of that.’
‘Give me what you will,’ I replied; ‘let it but be liquid and cool.’
The woman gave me a large horn accordingly, filled with spirits and water, which, without minute inquiry concerning the nature of its contents, I drained at a draught. Either the spirits taken in such a manner acted more suddenly than usual on my brain, or else there was some drug mixed with the beverage. I remember little after drinking it off, only that the appearance of things around me became indistinct; that the woman’s form seemed to multiply itself, and to flit in various figures around me, bearing the same lineaments as she herself did. I remember also that the discordant noises and cries of those without the cottage seemed to die away in a hum like that with which a nurse hushes her babe. At length I fell into a deep sound sleep, or rather, a state of absolute insensibility.